The Newsroom blog

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Welcome to the latest edition of the St Pancras Intelligencer, our weekly round-up of news about news - stories about news production, publications, apps, digitised resources, events and what is happening with the newspaper collection (and other news collections) at the British Library.

Restaurant review: My first reaction was âwowâ: The most heartening news story of the week has been the unpretentious review by student Holly Aston of her local Pizza Express for the Peterborough Telegraph. It rapidly went viral, not because people were laughing at it but because they recognised its charm. She has now been offered work experience by the Daily Mirror.

News from the community: The Newsroom blog looks at hyperlocal news websites, seeing parallels in their short history with the history of early newspapers, and announces plans for archiving them by the British Library.

Comic, Curious and Quirky: The British Library has just published Comic, Curious and Quirky News Stories from Centuries Past, by Rona Levin, a collection of bizarre and humorous stories taken from British newspapers from the 1700s to the 1900s.

Trove Traces: Trove Traces brings together some of the thousands of webpages that include links to articles in the National Library of Australia's Trove database (including its newspaper archive). A marvellous way of showing how a digital resource gives birth to so much scholarship and sharing of information.

News for the Minecraft generation: American media company Gannett, in partnership with the Des Moines Register, is experimenting with turning news stories into virtual reality experiences, using the Oculus Rift headset. First up is a tour of an Iowa farm rather than anything too contentiously dramatic or controversial.

Why do the best jobs go to men?: Eleanor Mills at British Journalism Review calls for greater opportunities to be given to women in newspapers (the last woman to edit a daily broadsheet was Rosie Boycott at The Independent from January to April 1998).

'F*** it, I quit': Charlo Greene, a reporter for Anchorage's KTVA, dramatically quit live on air (to the delight of the online world) following an item on marijuana saying that she was leaving to focus on marijuana legalisation in Alaska. She explains why to Huffington Post (which has the clip).

Posted by Luke McKernan at 7:42 AM

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Your blogger has been away on his holidays, now returned refreshed, so this edition of the St Pancras Intelligencer is a leisurely look back at some of the news items about news that caught our eye over the past three weeks.

This whole thing that's supposedly sacred to journalists about confidentiality of sources is in peril. And that requires urgent action by journalists to make sure they understand the technologies that will enable them to communicate.

Press Gazette reports.

Accuracy, independence and impartiality: A Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism report on how editorial standards are maintained in a digital age, focussing on three 'legacy organisations' (the Guardian, the New York Times, and the BBC) and three digital outlets (Quartz, BuzzFeed, and Vice News).

Can news literacy grow up?: Thoughts from Linday Beyerstein at Columbia Journalism Review on the "critical-thinking skills necessary to discern what is trustworthy in this churning informational stew".

Here comes the papers: After a year, while we closed down our former newspaper library at colindale and began populating the new store at Boston Spa, the British Library is ready to make print newspapers available again for researchers. Some will be available from end of September; the remainder in November. Our blog post has the details.

How robots consumed journalism: An intriguing short history of the involvement of robots in news production, starting in the 1770s with Swiss watchmaker Pierre Jaquet-Droz who built âThe Writer,â a 6,000-part automated doll that could be mechanically programmed to write with a quill. And for robots writing the news now (they're growing in number), there's this sobering Guardian piece: The journalists who never sleep (and one of the programme covered is called Quill).

Guardian building Guardian Space at King's Cross: The Guardian is renovating a 30,000 square foot space - Guardian Space - to host live activities at King's Cross. So, just around the corner for the British Library and its Newsroom. Hello there.

Posted by Luke McKernan at 7:56 AM

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Welcome to the latest edition of the St Pancras Intelligencer, our weekly round-up of news about news - stories about news production, publications, apps, digitised resources, events and what is happening with the newspaper collection (and other news collections) at the British Library.

Last call: Clay Shirky writes the obituary of the printed newspaper, and what it means for journalism, for Medium.

Contrary to the contrived ignorance of media reporters, the future of the daily newspaper is one of the few certainties in the current landscape: Most of them are going away, in this decade. (If you work at a paper and you donât know whatâs happened to your own circulation or revenue in the last few years, now might be a good time to ask.) Weâre late enough in the process that we can even predict the likely circumstance of its demise.

Over 4,000 BuzzFeed posts have completely disappears: Gawker reports with alarm that BuzzFeed has deleted many post from its site. In an interview with Slate, BuzzFeed boss Jonah Peretti explains why (they were "technically broken, not sourced to our current standards, not worth improving or saving because the content isnât very good") and says it's because they were originally a tech company not a journalistic one, though they are a journalistic one now.

Snapnews

The weird new future of news: New York-based discussion site The Awl reports that NowThisNews is looking to place its fleeting news reports to the apps of others. It reproduces some alarming examples of what a 90-second news briefing from NowThis News on Snapchat, the messaging service which deletes messages once they have been read, looks like. On the same subject, the Wall Street Journal reports News and ads to debut on Snapchat:

The product would let users read daily editions of publications as well as watch video clips of TV shows or movies by holding down a finger on the screen, like they do with photos and other messages on the app before disappearing.

The Illustrated First World War: Illustrated London News Ltd has launched a handsomely-designed website featuring 1914-1918 archive material from the Illustrated London News, with other titles in its collection (such as The Graphic, The Sketch and The Sphere) in due course - all free, thanks to a ÂŁ96K Heritage Lottery Fund grant.

The Guardian view of the Cliff Richard search: The controversial reporting by the BBC of a search of Cliff Richard's house is viewed by The Guardian as something that could could reopen issues about the police and the press that troubled Lord Justice Leveson.